Someone at RedHat (apparently Dale Lovelace) thought it would be a good
idea to remove the ^H characters from the bash-doc files. Here is the
relevant changelog entry:
* Fri Sep 14 1999 Dale Lovelace <dale@redhat.com>
- Remove annoying ^H's from documentation
What Dale obviously doesn't realize is that the ^H characters are there to
provide bold type and make the documentation read like a man page (with
syntax highlighting and such). Stripping those ^H characters makes all the
text plain and harder to read.
This was also a problem in 6.x